Paralysis is death. James Joyce, Dubliners

Paralysis occurs
When you cannot move
without everything tumbling down
around you.
Marriages crumble
Families disperse
Time freezes over a moment
That will reoccur, in your memory
Excavating the epics and rhapsodies
Of our lived  lives..
Removed from the fray.
The time of our birthday
Meets
The time of our deathday.
Stalagmites and stalactites,
Preserve us,
bog poets,
laugh, drily
suffocate quietly
By this spreading congestion
This exhausted contagion of people -
Killing all the other animals
Animals with soft eyes -
Wild and separated from the detritus of
Homo Sapiens,
The killer species.
Who are chronically on show
In Dublin – second city of the empire –
On the 16^th of June 1904:
Numbers were more manageable, then.